Last Friday, February 4th, I visited a Kushal Chakrabathi, CEO of a peer education non-profit that uses online microfinance to tackle the same challenges Givology tackles: lack of education financing for children in developing nations. This trip was one that I had held in high anticipation for a while. Kushal and I spoke with each other on the phone 6 months ago, when a fellow Wharton alumni (Dave Schappell) introduced us. Kushal was a source of inspiration for for as he left Amazon without a business plan for Vittana. Most people think that everything has to be lined up before "the right moment" to jump into social entrepreneurship and use passion to drive your ambitions. But this couldn't be farther from the truth.
Social entrepreneurs, like all entrepreneurs, recognize an unmet need in the marketplace and funnel compassion and intelligent execution of an idea to address it. For Kushal and the founding members of Givology, experiences and stories in developing countries we visited (India, China namely) galvanized us to action. For Kushal, it was a rickshaw driver who spent more than a third of his earnings on sending his children to school. For me, it was the children and parents I met in Ningxia during the summer of 2007. There are thousands of stories and moments that pass by in our lives that make us stop to think as human beings...what if we were as fortunate as we were? So much of where we all are today is due to the educational foundation our lives have been built on.
Kushal also mentioned (not in the video) that no organization has ever been able to run at 100% and scale up as fast as one that had full-time staff. I think the hypothesis is still being proved out, and Givology is continuing to blaze the trail. We pride ourselves on leveraging the cloud-sourcing of labor and have done so these past 3 years, and ultimately, we realize that regardless of what entity we are now and in the future, we also have no regrets in pushing innovation in the non-profit space - through technology, through breaking old molds and concepts, through connections, and through pulling countless amazing grassroots education entities who are so devoted on serving their communities but don't have a Fundraising Manager, and through truly democratizing philanthropy in education.
We will need your help in where we go next!
13 FEB 2011